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Don't Wait For Windows 8.1 -- Get Its Two Best 'Features' Right Now

Windows 8.1 (codenamed “Blue”) will reportedly reinstate two sorely missed features, but there’s no need to wait for MicrosoftMicrosoft‘s update to get them.

If you’ve recently upgraded to Windows 8, perhaps you miss your old reliable companion, the iconic Start button. While the death of the PC has certainly been exaggerated, Microsoft’s axing of the Start button from Windows 8 certainly hasn’t helped its adoption.

Further aggravating users has been the Metro Modern UI, an elegant touch-friendly interface that morphs into the bane of your existence with the absence of a touch-friendly monitor or gesture mouse. Windows 8′s default boot procedure is to boot into this new app hub instead of the traditional desktop. (Psst, hey Windows Client team: You should be detecting the type of display a user has and booting Windows into either the desktop or Metro based on what they have.)

Here’s the truth: I love Windows 8 because of its snappy boot speed and reliability. But I also love it because I already have the Start button and the boot to desktop feature installed, courtesy of a single free piece of software called Classic Shell.

With more than 300,000 downloads per week, the demand for these absent features certainly exists. Some power users have been rocking this app since Windows 8 launched, but it definitely doesn’t have mainstream awareness yet. Let’s change that with these steps:

As I said, Windows 8 and its Modern UI interface is fantastic and intuitive on a touch screen, but even on the Surface Pro I still prefer booting into my trusty desktop. It’s humorous that two features of Windows 8.1 will simply be the reinstating of two essential features that users have embraced since Windows 95. But hey, now you can get back to familiar territory whether or not the Windows 8.1 rumors ring true.

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I think that this writer is working for Microsoft. Go to any PC store and reboot a new computer running Windows 8. Bootups take a lot longer that I saw. Also, Microsoft…reliable? Since when?I also wonder why I have to “re-learn” software? WHY?

Wow, that’s quite an accusation and an uninformed one at that. I don’t believe a Microsoft employee would call Metro the bane of a persons existence. Also, I have a wealth of PCMark scores from multiple machines, with hard data showing why Win8 is faster if you like. This comment posted from my iPad ;)

In addition to the start button, I want my pull-down menus back. I hate the ribbon! I have been struggling to use it since the release of Office 2007, and it still makes me want to chuck my laptop out the nearest window! Pull-down menus have been around since the dos days because they are simple, and they work.

I had to help too many people using the public computers in the library I worked at with this. It is not intuitive. I don’t think I can recall one person (staff or user) who thought that the organization of this made any sense at all.

Whats funny is that Classic Shell has been out for awhile now and its just now being written about on here? This was one of the first things I installed as soon as I “upgraded” to Windows 8 on my new ultra book.

It is nice that Microsoft can sometimes admit to screwing up and giving people the start button back!

I do totally agree they could have bypassed the whole snafu by just detecting what type of hardware a user is running (which it does already) and determining the bootup based on that. Or even just ASKING during the install – “Hey we have this Crazy New Metro screen – or you can have your normal Desktop” would have been great!

Sergei, Google, are you listening? ANDROID on the Desktop PC. Now is your chance, nobody wants Windows 8.

Yes, the entire world is going mobile. But, there are still users (like me!) who edit videos, photos, play games, and render out high-quality digital media with tools like Adobe Lightroom and After Effects.

Even APPLE didn’t do something as STUPID as trying to make their mobile and desktop devices run on the SAME operating system (that’s what Win8 is, kids – one stop shopping for mobile devices.. desktops are dead to Microsoft, right?)

I won’t be upgrading. I build my own PCs, I’ll be going to Linux if Microsoft doesn’t make MAJOR changes soon. Valve and Steam are available via Linux, now if I can just get a port of Adobe software.. then I wouldn’t need WINDOWS AT ALL.

Microsoft should have stuck with Windows 7, which was the best OS they ever came up with and simply created a tablet version of it. That would have made things a lot simpler and it would have helped them cover the PC/lap top and tablet side of things. Win 8 could have been made exclusively for mobile phones. I hate the name “Windows”. They probably are capable of coming up with some attractive name. They must have gone to the consumers and asked if they wanted to keep the start menu button and task bar or not. If the consumers wanted it, then that is the selling point. Keep what they want and may be add other things slowly, one by one. There was no need to catch up with anyone on the PC/Laptop market. Everyone was quite happy with Windows 7. They could have made life easier for themselves by making a tablet version of it that could integrate everything. Their thinking could have been simple. But being engineering driven, they cannot help thinking in a complicated way. Consumer market is about simplicity and user experience. If they aim to capture it, they had to follow Apple’s lead in it.